Here’s the thing: As I attempt to create the internet platform that seems so damned sine qua non these days, I have issues with the fact that, apparently, the “internets” will only allow you to be one thing. What the hell happened to the good old days when people tried to be good at everything they did–when we tried to be Renaissance men and women?

Now, if we can’t tell you all that there is to know about ourselves in three or four words, you are just too high maintenance for Google to cope with.

So here’s the deal–I have made what little name I have made by writing books about homeopathy and healing. And I love studying, talking about and writing about homeopathy. For me, it represents the most nearly perfect form of medical treatment that we have available to us. It is a beautiful, healing modality of treatment. And I would like for every person in the whole world to know about it and to give it a try. People would be a lot better off if they did.

But here’s the other thing: man does not live by good works alone. I want to spend as much time making people laugh as I do making them reconsider their chosen form of medical treatment. I want Psora Psora Psora to be as much a pun of a movie name as it is a homeopathic reference. (See the link on the left of the page for more information on that.)

Do your agree? Do you, in your own life, want more than just what your day job has to offer? I say that, comes the revolution, we will be free, as the Army used to say, “to be all that we can be.” I say we grab that little motto by the throat and claim it as our own.

After working through the holiday weekend, around midnight last night I finally finished both projects that I had promised for today and emailed them to their destinations. I figured that, by this morning when I woke up, there would be praises in my email box and flowers at the door. (My mother, to her dying day, believed the Hollywood myth of the rich and famous writer and also believed that, because I have had a few books published, that I was among them. Repeated showings of Christmas in Connecticut could not dissuade her of this, even though the film clearly shows Barbara Stanwyck writing of her fictitious farm in Connecticut while sitting at her typewriter in her hovel in New York. And note that, while Christmas in Connecticut does its best to battle the myth of the rich writer, it actually helps support the myth of the rich architect. Something I know something about, as I am married to one. Putting a writer and an architect together does not great wealth create. The only thing we got right was the Connecticut part.)

Finally, just after lunch, I got one email. This one from my agent, who had wanted and needed that book proposal right after Labor Day. Seems that he forgot to tell me that he is off to Paris for the week and will be back on the fourteenth. (This only creates the myth of the rich agent in my mind. Although he lives in a Penthouse–from what I hear, I have never been invited there in all these years–so perhaps the agent part isn’t a myth after all.) Anyway, he said all the nice things about how great it was to see the proposal competed, blah, blah, blah, but I now have a week to wait until I get a response.

Could be worse. Still haven’t heard from the other guy, the editor of an online journal with whom I may soon be working. (And thus create the myth of the rich and famous online journalist.) More on that as it develops.

I fought it as long as I could. When my friend Stephanie said that I was born to tweet, that I would have pithy, witty things to say, I reminded me that, under normal circumstances, I can’t write my name in 140 characters (or whatever the amount you get is). I write sentences that Henry James would have criticized for being too long. I use dashes, parentheses and semi-colons in my spoken speech.

But a boy’s got to do what a boy’s got to do. And now I have joined Twitter. And Facebook. All while I should have been busy writing the proposal that Bob the Agent is expecting. (If you are reading this, Bob, I am kidding–being dramatic to build a readership. Of course I am working, day and night. The proposal will be in just in time for the hurricane.)

So I am at Twitter as @psoric. Or you can link to it off my LinkedIn page. And then there’s my Facebook page, but I am one of those people who limits everything to friends only. I always hated that until I actually joined myself.

Upcoming is a web site of my very own. Then I will have finished my “internet platform”. So get off my back about it, Bob.

With so many other changes going on, I figured it was time to make some changes to this damned blog as well. I preparation of the launch of my web site in coming weeks, I wanted to get this little rantorama ready as well. Forgive, forget and come along with me.

And about the name–well, it’s a homeopathic term that sort of guarantees that, on this blog, nothing will make much sense, nothing will run smoothly and that posts will be unpredictable at best. If there’s also a veiled movie reference, well, that can’t be helped.

August is supposed to be the slowest month, when we all lay in the sun on a beach in the South of France.

What happened? It has been the busiest month I have had in years. In spite of the juice fast–which still continues, don’t get me wrong, it takes more than a little work to get me to eat. I am just splitting my time between the keyboard and the toilet.

It all started because I joined my little professional social site. And all anyone there ever talks about is their electronic rights. “Oh, I have reasserted my electronic rights!” posts one know-it-all in a thread of conversation that was otherwise sweetly discussing the plight of being a freelance writer in the time of the Great Recession. In other words, we were all bitching, moaning and giving each other tips on how to cram 30 hours of leisure into a 24 hour day. And suddenly, our whole thread was hijacked by the notion that we ought to be doing something–we ought to be reasserting our electronic rights, which, next to our right to vote and our right of free speech, is the most cherished right of all.

And so I went down down down into the basement and dug around in my old file cabinet and found my old contracts with my publishers. Turned out that my most recent publisher had the rights to all four books I did with them. I checked with Amazon and found that two of the four books were already ebooks, so I figured so far so good. It only took a phone call to get the ball rolling for the other two.

I checked another contract and found that, although my first publisher had had the e-rights for nearly a decade now, they had never asserted them. I tried contacting them, but got lost in the loop and, in the end, had to ask my agent to intercede. He did and my old editor was raised up from the dead and sent me an email and contracts soon followed. The terms of the ebooks weren’t great, they were what seems to be the new corporate standard of just 25% (Why is this? It’s not like the publisher has any outlay of money associated with transforming the books into ebooks, right? I want more. I deserve more. And yet, I signed away the rights in a time before they had any value, and if I want the books to be ebooks, I have to agree with the terms. Ick.)

My third old publisher was the strangest of all–getting to sound like a bad romance movie and I am revisiting old boyfriends, not publishers–it turns out that this was the one company that had not bought the electronic rights, but they were also the one company that was actively selling the ebook version of my old book. When I pointed this out to them they basically said, “Sorry for the inconvenience.” When I pointed out that they had actually stolen something that did not belong to them, the phone went dead. Ultimately, I got legal notification of the restoration of my electronic rights and a small check that is supposed to represent my half of all the profits from the ebooks sold. (A new electronic edition of the book is planned for next year, which will be updated and improved and which will sell for less than the print version of the book,undercutting the publisher who did me wrong.)

And so, with all my e-ducks in a row, I began my next endeavor, a co-publishing venture with one of my old publishers. In this case, they will take the print run, while I retain my e-rights and present the line of books as Amazon exclusives. I have learned my lesson well. My platform continues to grow.

Day three of the juice fast and I should be very busy working (if my agent Bob should read this, I am only joking, of course and I am very busy working working working), but instead, due to the whoo whoo of the juice fast, I find myself transfixed by Turner Classic Movies.

Each August, TCM presents Summer Under the Stars for the whole month of August, during which each day is dedicated to twenty-four full hours of the best movies by a particular movie star. And while each year for some unknown reason we have to endure yet another tribute to Katharine Hepburn, other days bring unexpected bounties. Yesterday, the second day of my juice fast, was Julie Christie day, which is, for me, the best of all possible days. The Go-Between. Far From the Madding Crowd. Dr. Zhivago, of course, and the part in which they are living in the ice palace and he is writing the poems for and about Lara and she is there with him, more beautiful than any actress ever before or since. And, of course, Darling–one of the best of the best of the best movies ever made. Julie Christie was one of the rare actresses who was so beautiful and, at the same time, radiated such intelligence and charisma that it was easy to accept that, in a movie like Far from the Madding Crowd three men all love her enough to be willing to die for her or kill for her, or that, in a movie like Dr. Zhivago (which would have been a long, slow-go without her), the Russian revolution seems to have been caused because of her.

Today, it’s Steve McQueen. Not quite the same thing, but similar in terms of charisma. Again, something in him transcends acting, or renders acting unimportant. There is something that happens when the camera points to him that makes him seem cooler, slicker, smarter and much much braver than you and I. With The Blob done and Junior Bonner yet to come, it is another day done, a mixture of carrot juice and old movies as August continues to burn away outside my window.

At the “professional” social site to which I belong–and I am wondering daily why it considers itself to be such a professional site when a goodly number of its members seem to be feeling their way through life blindfolded, as if down a long, dark tunnel, screaming all the while in order to guide themselves on their journey by their own echoes–I received a note yesterday from another member, let us call her “Big Ethel”, which is not her real name.

I had written to her some weeks ago when a third member, let us call her Madam X, wrote a question in one of our groups that contained within it a misuse of the word “moot”. Not a crime in and of itself, but enough to unleash a number of corrections and complaints in response to the question, rather than any answers to the question itself.

Now I could simply conclude here by saying that, in her misuse of the word, she rendered her whole question moot, but I shall not. Because this is all about Big Ethel.

You see, I had written to Madam X about the moot issue as well, but had written to her early and privately. She responded to me rather dearly, saying that she is new to English and still learning and asking me for the correct usage of the word moot. I sent it back to her, along with my greeting and apologies for having corrected her in the first place, as I now understood her plight.

So when Big Ethel got all loud and bothered (as I had seen her do in other discussion threads) about the mistaken use of moot, I sent her a private message explaining that Madam X is doing her best, etc., etc.

This was the message she responded to, after a long, long pause. I received her answer yesterday. I picture her laboring over every snarky word of her response, which would explain why it took so very long for me to get it.

She wrote: “Well, I’ll say this. I blog in Spanish for a company in China. English is my native language. I am careful about usage, syntax, vocab, and grammar when I write in Spanish. I don’t get a pass from my publisher, I’m afraid. You’re young lady comes across as kind of overblown with the high-fallutin words and phrases. Maybe a focus on writing for the audience would help her progress. No one is ever too good to learn. ;)”

Now, in reading it, I noticed several things all at once: the idiotic little winky face (her trademark, I’m afraid), the fact that she failed to understand that it is quite unfair (the essence of snark) to equate something she is doing for pay with a simple question that a member asked her fellow members in an online “professional” social site group, and the overall feeling of what a complete ass Big Ethel must surely be. And then I saw it.

Perhaps you have seen it yourself, if you are a more careful reader than I.

In her next-to-the-last sentence, the all-mightly Big Ethel wrote “you’re” when she clearly meant “your”. As in “your little friend”…

Imagine my glee.

I, of course, responded to Big Ethel in a characteristic manner, sorry only that this was a private message and not for the consumption of the whole group, whose members must surely agree with me on their Big Ethel fatigue after the many times she has taken us all to task.

But that is not the point. The point it that I see in Big Ethel’s note further proof of God’s existence. Some people look for Him in Big Gestures, but I seek Him in the small things, the little jokes like this that He leaves for me, like breadcrumbs on my life’s path. Just when I am feeling weary that the Big Ethels of the world will crush us all in the end under the weight of their egos and their enormous breasts, God creates the miracle: a sweet little grammatical error just waiting there, like Moses in the reeds.

And so my faith is restored, and so I can continue on my way, rejoicing.